How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows

orangerobot writes "The latest issue of Fast Company has an article about how Google has managed to survive beyond its peers and develop a culture of openness and innovation. The article also mentions Google memes and spin-offs such as: Googlewhack, Googlebombing, Googleshare, Googlism and Google Smackdown."

Comments

That's because it works

[coolmacdude]

When was the last time anyone visited another search engine? I can't remember when I did.

Re:That's because it works

[ergo98]

Indeed. Are we at the point yet where we declare Google a monopoly and start rooting for a competing search engine just because?

Seriously, though, apart from the barriers to entry (namely having the computing power, storage, and bandwidth to spider the entire web) there are a wide range of ways that Google could be bested. The only reason they weren't before is that the major competitors saw search engines as a money losing proposition, and started throwing all their money behind duplicating Yahoo, making online communities, auctions, etc.

Re:That's because it works

[RLiegh]

The last two that I can remember visiting are yahoo (which is google with a layer of yahoo on top) and dogpile, which I wasn't satisfied with.

What I find odd is that I am the only person I know who does use google, and has for some time. My family uses whatever comes with aol, and my ex-gf used to use altavista.

Re:That's because it works

[Joe the Lesser]

I happened to use Yahoo! earlier today, since they have news on their site, and links to other useful tools like yahoo maps, and free email... It also seems to work.

Re:That's because it works

[RLiegh]

I assume you're aware of http://news.google.com ?
Personally speaking, I haven't trusted yahoo's news coverage in 2 or 3 years.

Re:That's because it works

[John_Renne]

Google is one of the finest search-engines around but I use several different search-engines quit often. There's Kartoo that has great looks and vivisimo that has the abillity to group results.

Re:That's because it works

[garcia]

no. are they forcing us to use it? is Google installed on ALL new computers without the option of having another?

there is two reasons I use Google:

1. On my p133 laptop w/Win98 Google loads faster than any other page (I never realized how slow a P133 was until I waited for /. to load as the homepage).

2. It fucking works. Not in the way that Windows "works". It just works. I type in whatever I am looking for (phone numbers, addresses, names, random things) and it comes up w/what I wanted w/o having to search 10000000's of results.

It's not a monopoly, it's a good product.

Re:That's because it works

[a_peckover]

Yep, that's Google told. They won't be invading any more Middle Eastern countries.

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Googles new is a mess. You get the same stories about 10 times on the page, and the same topics covered every day for weeks now. If a human were sorting them, it'd show a bit more...intelligence.

Re:That's because it works

[MrScience]

Might I point you to what I feel is the superior news.google.com
and
the fact that google does maps?

Re:That's because it works

[will_die]

It was back a few years ago when Alta Vista came up fast, had a better search, and had more pages parsed.
The fact is Google is the current boss because it is fast and gets you to want you want. If they were to become ad loaded pages, people would be switching to the next best thing.

Re:That's because it works

[larien]

It's not a monopoly, it's a good product.

Just because it's a good product doesn't prevent it from being a monopoly.

Re:That's because it works

[garcia]

the fact that it does phone numbers to address/name mapping?

my old address and phone number, and the address is wrong, but that was the phone companies fault :)

Re:That's because it works

[Draoi]

is Google installed on ALL new computers without the option of having another?

Interestingly enough, Apple has started a trend by building in a Google search widget into their new safari browser.

Imagine what would happen if MS tried this tactic and built in, say, AltaVista into the next release of IE. Popularity would skyrocket overnight ...

Re:That's because it works

[garcia]

sorry, I even did a "preview".

Here's the corrected URL

Re:That's because it works

[garcia]

but did Google make Apple's OS?

Did Google FORCE Apple to put that widget on there?

Did Google FORCE computer manufactorers to NOT put OTHER search engine widgets on the computers?

No. It's an Internet site that does what it is supposed to and does it well.

Re:That's because it works

[UpnAtom]

Does it "work" or do you think it "works"?

Because you'll get a completely different search singular/plural.

This is one way in which Google can be improved or bested.

Since I use Opera, I can search multiple search engines just by typing "s " into an address bar. And the results will pop up side-by-side in separate tiled windows. How much fussing does that take in IE?

Dave.

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

There are other search engines?

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

A "monopoly" is generally defined as something like having greater than 90% of the available market share. Google might have that, but it's hard to definitively measure, whereas what OS someone uses is much easier.

Also, forcing someone to use a product is not being monopolistic. Just having a monopoly on a market in and of itself is not illegal, but it requires the monopoly to play by a different set of rules. It's when the monopoly starts to force their product upon others (in other words - preventing a legitimate competitor a fair opportunity to join the market) - that's when you've crossed the line.

Google has not done that in any way. If Google were to start inking deals where NEtscape, IE, Mozilla, Konq, Opera, et al, were to make google.com the default home page in their browsers, that might become an issue. But that's just a hypothetical example.

Re:That's because it works

[k_187]

well, in IE if you type something random into the URL bar it does a search on MSN already and I don't really think that MSN search is that popular.

Re:That's because it works

[generic-man]

MSN is #3, after Yahoo and Google. As of last October, they had a market share of nearly 10%. While not as large as Google, they still have a significant market share.

Re:That's because it works

[generic-man]

Google doesn't do maps. It provides you with a link to sites that do have maps. One of these sites is -- surprise! -- Yahoo! Maps. Yahoo! Maps provides driving directions. Google provides links to driving directions from Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps.

Likewise, Google News is a disjointed mess. Many news searches turn up page after page of 404 errors because most external news sites delete their pages after 2-3 weeks.

Re:That's because it works

[naoiseo]

thats because yahoo's search results are staight Google

Re:That's because it works

[WolfWithoutAClause]

It's not a monopoly, it's a good product.

No. It's a monopoly (I think) and it's a good product.

There's nothing inherently illegal or immoral about monopolies.

On the other hand, certain things that some monopolistic companies try to do are illegal, only because they are monopolies; if a non monopolistic company had done it, they'd be fine.

Re:That's because it works

[generic-man]

Wow, that's terrible.

This phone number was disconnected four years ago, but Google insists that it's still valid. Reminds me of how my dad's GPS system -- which he bought late last year -- offered to navigate us to an address at "7 World Trade Center" in New York.

Computers are far from perfect.

Re:That's because it works

[AftanGustur]

Just because it's a good product doesn't prevent it from being a monopoly.

Correct, monopoly is defined as somebody who can block normal competition by financial means or market position.

And although Google basically "owns" the market, I just can't see how Google could "block" somebody who would want to compete.

After all, it's the customers who choose every day to go to Google without any manipulation from Google (apart from a good service).

Re:That's because it works

[generic-man]

"Yahoo's news coverage" consists of feeds from major wire services like the Associated Press. The next time you go to Google News, I want you to count all the stories that are posted from 400 news sites. Notice how many of them are reprinted wire stories?

At least with Yahoo News I can customize the page so I see news for, say, sports I care about instead of cricket and soccer.

Re:That's because it works

[generic-man]

My family uses whatever comes with aol,

AOL uses Google. They even mention it in their ever-present TV ads.

Re:That's because it works

[alastairm]

but only for the USians :-(

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

I think MSN is #3 just because everyone who types bad in an URL input it searchs on the MSN website.

MSN search is a monopoly product.

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you going to tell us what you do use, Mr. I-like-to-be-contrary-for-contrariness's-sake?

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

I use AlltheWeb.com. And no not because I hate Google. I actually like Google a lot, am growing to adore it, but I love AlltheWeb. I use them both often, sometimes running the same search to compare results. I often find things on AlltheWeb that I can't find on Google, and when I can't find something on AlltheWeb, I immediately go to Google.

But I admit my search engine lists--use to include about 10 different stops, and now it only has three primary stops-- AlltheWeb, Google, and Kartoo (excluding dictionary, lyric searchs), I still occasionally use Northern Lights, but they've gotten more useless with time.

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool on the Vivisimo. I've kept Northern Lights in my search list, primarily because of this function, even though they've sucked during the last 2 years. I also love Kartoo--much better than other sites that do similar with Java Applets. I find the Flash interface to be faster than Java, and not as trouble prone across browsers. But when more and more of your searches become about how data relates to each other, you'll find brute force or even nicely weighed algorythmic lists, don't always cut it-- this is where Kartoo and Vivisimo work.

Re:That's because it works

[generic-man]

So? AOL search, which is now Google, used to be #1 simply because AOL has 34 million users.

Market share is market share, whether the user types in the search engine URL or it's the default.

Re:That's because it works

[SergioB]

What search engine behind google you are using, if it's not secret?

Re:That's because it works

[poot_rootbeer]

Just because it's a good product doesn't prevent it from being a monopoly.

Just because it's a monopoly doesn't prevent it from being good.

Re:That's because it works

[schmink182]

Googles new is a mess. You get the same stories about 10 times on the page, and the same topics covered every day for weeks now. If a human were sorting them, it'd show a bit more...intelligence

If he minded news being repeated 10 times a day, I don't think he'd be reading Slashdot

Re:That's because it works

[Henk Poley]

"I never realized how slow a P133 was until I waited for /. to load as the homepage"

Slow loading? You should try Opera6, *though* it has intergrated Google search ;-)
[You can chose from others off coarse]

Bewarned, Opera7 is just too slow on these old machines :-(

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Google only keeps news events around for 30 days[google.com] which isn't that much longer than 2-3 weeks (which seems a little short in my experience.) I use google news all the time and rarely get 404's, but they do happen of course.

Re:That's because it works

[aelfwyne]

One should also keep in mind the very important fact of the fact that many of Yahoo's search features are indeed "google powered" now. So that means that yahoo isn't *directly* competing with google, only indirectly (as the portal of choice).

Re:That's because it works

[drsmithy]

On the other hand, certain things that some monopolistic companies try to do are illegal, only because they are monopolies; if a non monopolistic company had done it, they'd be fine.

And the big problem with that is since a company doesn't _know_ it's a monopoly until it's legally ruled one, they can literally be breaking the law without knowing it.

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Google will be king only as long as google is best.
I recall at least a half dozen search engines being 'best' untill they got replaced by something better. Once google gets complacant we'll all start using the next best thing.

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

You're so fucking stupid, it's just not funny. Do us all a favor and shoot yourself in the head - if you can even manage to do that with that head full of shit you have.

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

and you'll notice that google then links to either Yahoo! maps, or MapQuest
so, no. google doesn't do it's own maps

Re:That's because it works

[saifatlast]

Mozilla 1.2.1 includes an option to search on google for a phrase typed directly into the taskbar. I would assume later version do too, but I'm too lazy to go download them.

Re:That's because it works

[ll77]

Got to disagree with your definition of monopoly as "somebody who can block normal competition by financial means or market position" A monopoly is a supplier of goods in a market where there is only one supplier of goods. Or in some less strict definitions, the supplier in a market that has an overwhelming majority of the market. Now, usually a monopolist has monopoly power where your definition comes into play. But, it is possible for a monopolist to not be able to exercise monopoly power because the goods that the monopolist sells are freely substitible. For example, imagine you live in a small suburb with only one grocery store. That grocery store is a monopoly in your suburb, but because you can easily drive to the next suburb over and buy your groceries there, the monopolist grocery store in your suburb doesn't really have monopoly power. p.s. I know the example is contrived by overly restricting the geographic market, but that's why it's an example.

Re:That's because it works

[jpop32]

And although Google basically "owns" the market, I just can't see how Google could "block" somebody who would want to compete.

Simple. They would just block it from the results when looking for 'search engines'. ;-)

Re:That's because it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Other search engines exist? Really??

Re:That's because it works

[Zagadka]

I tried using Kartoo, and it seemed to be completely useless. What's an example of a query where Kartoo actually gives useful results?

Re:That's because it works

[MainframeKiller]

When was the last time anyone visited another search engine? I can't remember when I did

You might want to try Mamma.com a meta search engine that finds stuff that even Google doesn't find.

And on top of that, Mamma also searches Google, so you can't go wrong with Mamma!

Re:That's because it works

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

"and my ex-gf used to use altavista."

she supported that intrusive crap? I'd of dumped her to.

Re:That's because it works

[kasperd]

Are we at the point yet where we declare Google a monopoly and start rooting for a competing search engine just because?

If you want to make a competitive alternative to google, you must violate The Robots Exclusion Protocol. Why? Because you will find a lot of robots.txt files on the net that allows googlebot to index more pages than other robots. You could of course insist that this is unfair and program your own robot in a way that will make it download anything allowed to google, but that would be a violation. The best plan if you really want to get a lot of pages in spite of webservers misbehaving and being unfair would be to make three different crawlers each running on different sets of computers:

1. A well behaved crawler identifying itself correctly and downloading only what it is allowed to.
2. A crawler that identifies itself as googlebot and downloads anything allowed to google.
3. A crawler that identifies itself as IE and downloads anything allowed to one of the major crawlers or by the * matching. This one shouldn't download robots.txt but just use the version downloaded by the other crawlers.

Re:That's because it works

[AftanGustur]

Got to disagree with your definition of monopoly as "somebody who can block normal competition by financial means or market position"

Sure you can disagree, it's your right. However it's not *my* definition of monopoly. It's the definition that's tought in "Economics 101".

A monopoly is a supplier of goods in a market where there is only one supplier of goods.

There are no markets where there is "only one supplier of goods". Well, unless in some communist states where competition is forbidden by law (and enforced by public executions), but even there you have the "black market" which is a competition.

For example, imagine you live in a small suburb with only one grocery store. That grocery store is a monopoly in your suburb,

Uhh ?? No !, not according to any definition of the word "monopoly" I have ever heard. Don't forget that there is a thing called "market area" and that even a Internet shop on the moon can be a competition. That's how the Hypermarkets work. They install themselves in some cheap area, relatively far away from the most expensive living areas. Yet, they often manage to kill off the local grocery shops because they are much cheaper.

Hooray for that little program!

[airrage]

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the google operating system is a little program -- a small, insignificant ranking program -- who is trying at this moment to break free and interface with his user: google-one.

Re:Hooray for that little program!

[Alan Partridge]

just you wait!

when Google's array of computers finally achieves self-awareness we're all in BIG trouble

smash the spinning Jenny!

Googlewhack?

[CmdrWass]

What's googlewhack?

Re:Googlewhack?

[Conspiracy Theorist]

A google search of two terms that only results in one hit. Unfortunately observing and documenting a googlewhack on the web usually results in it losing it's googlewhack status.

Re:Googlewhack?

[Conspiracy Theorist]

Replying to my own post, I know, I know...

But anyway, as an example of a googlewhack:
placating counterbombardment is currently a googlewhack. As soon as this page gets indexed by google, it will cease to be so.

Re:Googlewhack?

[mshiltonj]

As soon as this page gets indexed by google, it will cease to be so.

I think that by slightly modifying the search to be:
"placating counterbombardment -googlewhack" might still qualify as a success.

Or, you could instruct google not to index your page about googlewhacking.

Re:Googlewhack?

[Genyin]

except that a googlewhack has to be precisely two terms.

Re:Googlewhack?

[Noren]

Does it count if it has just one hit but three sponsored ads? Like, for example, Tintinnabulation and Oolong?

Re:Googlewhack?

[Conspiracy Theorist]

From what I remember, yes it does. What you are looking for is the phrase Results 1 - 1 of 1. Ads can be ignored.

Googledot dot org

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to Googledot dot!!!!

Bringing you every single fucking piece of news about Google you can dig up!!

Can I be a slashdot editor now?

Spy

[sokkelih]

And google information-about-users-surfing-database grows, and it grows... :)

Re:Spy

[havokk]

...and grows ;)))))

Did you forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only and only Googlefight.com?

insignia

Re:Did you forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

This returns windows to be the winner over linux. I will never use it again.

Don't complain about the lack of options ;)

[DarklordJonnyDigital]

Is that all? A dozen comments will give you the most excellent GoogleFight, no doubt. Googleshng deserves an honourable mention. Enjoy.

Re:Don't complain about the lack of options ;)

[alnapp]

or my fav Google-eyes

Ah, Worng end of the stick again

Re:Don't complain about the lack of options ;)

[Kidbro]

A dozen comments will give you the most excellent GoogleFight

How could I possibly resist?

Now we know for sure...

All Search Engines are doomed to fail...

[Saint Stephen]

And Google will fail too. A few months back I noticed my "Web" searches were taking me less and less to the "right" page and more and more often to some clearinghouse page that some sponsored link wanted me to go to. That's stopped a bit for now, but if google IPO's, it will become rampant then people will abandon google.

Face it, nothing on the internet is ever going to make a whole pile of money. The more popular you get the greater the likelihood of impending failure.

Re:All Search Engines are doomed to fail...

[DanDwig]

To the best of my knowledge google has never altered their search results to Rank Up advertisers. They do head the page with a couple of sponsored links, and more down the side, but the results themselves are clean. I don't think that's likely to change even if they do IPO. I don't mind a few ads, especially since they are usually on topic, and since they don't interfere with the search. (Suprisingly companies do have a right to try to make money.)

Re:All Search Engines are doomed to fail...

[Saint Stephen]

Y'all can mod this as a troll all you want, but that's totally not my intention.

These are the facts (who knows why):

(1) Google usually takes you to the information you want.
(2) Few months back, last time google got lots of big press, for about two months my searches stopped taking me where I wanted to go and started to take me to more dubious places. Around this time there was a whole lot of press about google monkeying with the Page Rank system, how they wouldn't discuss it, etc. All I know is, during that time, the quality of my searches decreased dramatically.
(3) After a while, the quality of my searches went back up. Again, who knows why.

When I say "quality of my searches went down" I mean that instead of going to the DEFINIITIVE source of some information I searched for (unless I was extremely specific, like you used to have to be pre-google), I was much more likely to be taken to some large-scale commercial and less-definitive source of information. It might not have been google doing it specifically, but whatever, I came damn close to saying google has "jumped the shark."

Is there a point?

[hafree]

Googleshare The invention of blogger Steven Berlin Johnson. Search Google for one word. Then search those results for the name of a person. Divide the number of results delivered for your second search by those from the first to get that person's "semantic mindshare" of the word.

Is it just me or does this seem like one of the most pointless ides for a web site ever? Why would you devise a mathematical equation that calculates nothing...

Re:Is there a point?

[phrantic]

"...If there were 10 sheep in a field and farmer Bob owned 5 of them what would farmer Bobs "semantic mindshare" of sheep be?

Bonus Question:
1) What is the proper Unit for "semantic mindshare".
2) Express this in Hogheads/furlong
Yeah i agree with hafree this is around as usual as an ashtray on a motorbike.

Re:Is there a point?

[huhmz]

1) What is the proper Unit for "semantic mindshare".

Clearly you are not yet familiar with the unit "Library of Congress". If there is anything slashdot has taught us it's that _anything_ can be measured in LOC.

SIMPLICITY

[_PimpDaddy7_]

Google just seems to "get it".

They took a simple idea and kept it simple, yet making it extremely powerful.

Re:SIMPLICITY

[Anonymous Coward]

Much like your post.

Re:SIMPLICITY

[ejaw5]

Exactly! Just look at Yahoo. Not only did they try to build a good search engine (which they were successful for some time), but IMO they overstretched and tried to build an entire web community with email, chats, geocities web host, and free internet via BlueLight.com. Google on the other hand seems to have the priority of giving you the *information* you seek fast and straightforward, uncluttered with huge ad banners and the like.

Re:SIMPLICITY

[belloc]

SIMPLICITY. Google just seems to "get it". They took a simple idea and kept it simple, yet making it extremely powerful.

Put another way:

Q: Why is everyone so obsessed about Google?

A: Google is the ultimate paradox. On the one hand they don't give a crap, but on the other hand, Google is very careful and precise.

Re:SIMPLICITY

[NDPTAL85]

Thanks to CEO Terry Semel, Yahoo is actually making money again. So in what way did they over-reach?

Re:SIMPLICITY

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly NDPTAL85, you forget that in these here parts, if it's profitable, it ain't cool.

Googlewhack?

[Levine]

Google smackdown and Googlewhack? I hadn't heard of these terms before, but after looking at them, perhaps it is for the best...

levine

Google as a business

[totallygeek]

I suppose with all the advertising and being the best search engine they are running well in the black, but I wonder for how long. Yahoo at one time was the only search engine most used (okay, so I used Alta Vista). All it would take is another search engine to crop up for less money that has a better method and Google is out of the limelight. So, I understand them moving into other areas of business. What has this done for their company, and when are they going public?

Re:Google as a business

[Dun Malg]

What has this done for their company, and when are they going public?

I don't understand why people equate IPO's with success. An IPO is basically floating an unsecured loan from the public at large. If they have a solid business model which doesn't require them to outlay huge wads of cash they don't have in order to expand, I'd say they're doing pretty darn well.

Re:Google as a business

[b!arg]

Actually to be technically accurate you are defining a bond and not stocks. Stocks are not unsecured loans, they are equity. To bring it to a smaller scale. Say you own your own business, and you need to expand, you have two ways to go. You can get a loan from the bank (bonds) or you can find a new investor (stocks). With the bank loan you pay it off, with interest. After it matures you're done with it. With the new investor you split the profits and that person will always get that amount of profit based on how much equity he or she has put into the business. The more equity you have, the more you get back. The only way to be done with that is to buy the persons' share of equity.

IPOs really are a function of (estimated) current and future earnings. Or rather that's what they should be about and why everyone got whacked in the head in 2000 and on. So essentially a good IPO should generally say that they have a good business. An IPO does not...look at all the IPOs that end their first day below the initial price. Going public for the sake of going public is stupid and just kind of a race to get as much cash as I possibly can...NOW! So in that regard I agree with the fact that Google seems to be doing it right.

Re:Google as a business

[Anonymous Coward]

What's their solid business model? Sponsored search?

(does some math)

Tick tock tick tock tick tock ...

A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is interesting to note that Google has been the only major coroporation to be successful while employing an 'ethical' policy. Unlike other search engines their page ranking system is 110% fair as they do not accept 'payments' (read bribes)to increasing ranking scores, they have not adopted widespread advertising (although most people would be happier if they had never allowed advertising on the site at all), and they have released all their search algorithms to the scientific community which has been a boon to people reaearching in Mathmatics/Computer Science.

Finally they used Linux when most of the other web businesses were running Windows. Their example has shown that a business running linux can suceed, even though it can be more difficult than running windows.

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[shish]

> and they have released all their search algorithms to the scientific community

but patented them >:-(

> although most people would be happier if they had never allowed advertising on the site at all

I've found that google is the only site ever that actually gives useful on-topic ads, and thus the only ads I ever follow are google ones

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[jkujawa]

Google's patents tend to actually be valid.
The patent system, as it was originally intended, is not evil. Google's technology tends to be novel and innovative, which is exactly what the patent system was intended to foster.

They're not patenting things like "1-click".

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[jsinger]

> and they have released all their search algorithms to the scientific community

but patented them >:-(


Who the heck wouldn't patent an item that drives their complete business?

Google has some very impressive search capabilities, to give them away without laying some sort of claim would easily allow a group of students to improve and profit off of it. I'm sure this is not what Google has intended. :)

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike other search engines their page ranking system is 110% fair...

Sure, 110% fair might be good enough for now, but as soon as another search engine comes along that is 120% fair Google will be left in the dust. If you ask me, they should stop focusing on things like Google News and starting working on raising their percent fairness. I personally don't like having to settle for less than 200% fairness.

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[wmspringer]

Would you happen to know where you can find those algorithms?

I suppose I ought to be able to find them on google..

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[lylonius]

I would hardly consider the google toolbar to have a triumphant level of ethics.

Not only does google plant an "infinite" cookie (infinite in unix epoch land) to uniquely id each user, but it logs every web site you visit, every GET string from each of those sites, as well as each HTTP REFERER. In terms of contextual user-tracking, that's a fairly significant breach of user-privacy.

I realize that google makes their disclaimer very clear, but so do most other spyware companies. I also realize that we can all disable sending cookies to google as well. Unfortuneatly most anti-spyware products like spybot and ad-aware do not flag google's behavior as such, leaving many users in the dark regarding google's monitoring. I also realize that many people have personal firewalls, but the toolbar sends its requests to the same IP as each of the www sites at each of Google's 7 data centers... disabling the toolbar monitoring effectively disables your use of their web site.

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[cyb97]

Who the heck wouldn't patent an item that drives their complete business?

Car manufacturers?
IBM-compatibles ?

There are loads of examples of companies making almost single products that doesn't patent their work. Patenting stops growth, the PC wouldn't have taken of unless other companies were allowed to start making IBM-compatibles (though it weren't completly IBMs will ;-)

Look at the compact disc, the only successfull cross-media medium for the last 20 years, why ?
It was a standard not a patent and sony shared it with who ever wanted to use it...

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[Anonymous Coward]

the compact disc was invented by phillips.

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[jsinger]

I agree, however a search algorithm is very different than a CD format, vehicle, or even an IBM compatible PC. These things are seen and touched by consumers many more times a day than a search algorithm is, and have much more impact on daily lives.

I guarantee you that major car manufacturers hold patents on aspects of vehicles that they have created. That doesn't mean it cant be created another way, just not in the same way the patent protects. Patenting doesn't always stop growth, it can also fuel innovation.

The average consumer doesn't care that the parts under their hood aren't yielding more performance due to patents, they care about what it looks like on the outside, and that they can get to the football game. The average surfer doesn't care that one engine returns slightly different results, they care that they can find some resources on their search.

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[clonebarkins]

The patent system, as it was originally intended, is not evil. Google's technology tends to be novel and innovative, which is exactly what the patent system was intended to foster.

Exactly! And when Google's patents run out, at least we know their algorithms will be available to the public since they've already been released, as opposed to other companies that might try to hide or suppress such things.

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[ceejayoz]

You'd have a valid point if Google didn't make you read this page prior to downloading the toolbar. They couldn't have made it any clearer, IMO.

"By using the Advanced Features version of the Google Toolbar, you may be sending information about the sites you visit to Google."

"Google will not sell or provide personally identifiable information to any third parties."

"We understand and respect your privacy concerns. By selecting this option, you will not have access to advanced functionality. However, no information about the sites you visit will be communicated to Google."

Hell, you can even install it without the monitoring - no need to block it with a firewall.

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[PurpleFloyd]

Google's toolbar sends data on the sites you browse only with the advanced features turned on. These advanced features are things like the ability to view Pagerank, or "Pagerank voting" - you can click a plus or minus button, and have a very slight effect on a page's Pagerank. I don't see how Google could implement either without sending a query to their servers containing the URL of the current site.

The privacy implications of these features are laid out very clearly in the configuration page, in plain English, right next to the button that allows you to disable them. I don't know of any spyware that will give you any information on what you have unwittingly allowed them to monitor outside a near-incomprehensible EULA, and I don't know of any spyware that will allow you to turn off its monitoring "features" easily.

The only thing I can really fault Google for is its treatment of the Scientology search-blocking issue, but it seemed to me they were only trying to follow the law and not get burned themselves; the issue was more the DMCA's fault (to keep your rights as a common carrier, you must remove materials which are alleged to be copyrighted immediately upon notice).

Regarding the GUID, Google keeps track of users' clickthroughs and uses that as a Pagerank modifier. The GUID prevents someone from simply querying Google and clicking through to their own page lots of times - basically stuffing the ballot box. Slashdot does something similar for its poll-voting code; it tracks the IP (which is as close as you can get to an Internet-wide GUID) and I don't see you complaining about that. Google isn't perfect, but they don't act like Microsoft either.

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[xenobyte]

Why doesn't anyone mention Google censorship? - Oh wait... I'm doing that right now! :-)

The very fact that Google gives in to any kind of censorship is very sad, especially the fact that they're not admitting it openly. There is no reason at all why Google should comply in any way, shape or form to foreign government 'requests' (orders) to make certain materials harder to find. Google should always attempt to be as complete as possible, including whatever its spiders find.

It's very simple: If a government doesn't want its people to look for something, educate the people! - Don't try to find half-assed ways to implement censorship through bullying or technical means. Yes, information still wants to be free. All of it actually.

Read more about Google censorship here

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[cyb97]

But the question here was companies patenting their whole product, I don't hold anything again google if they patent a particular piece of technology that makes up parts of their search engine, but when (it seems to me like) they're trying to blanket ban everybody else from constructing a searchengine similar to google, it's wrong!
It would be like a car manufacturer trying to patent the notion of automobiles going faster than 60 mph or having 4 wheels etc. IMHO ofcourse ;-)

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[hankwang]

> they have released all their search algorithms to the scientific community

As far as I know only the original version of the google algorithm was released when Google was still an academic project. However, though that algorithm is still the basic principle, all modifications to prevent abuse through link farms, duplicate contents etc. are not public.

Re:A triumph for google is a triumph for ethics.

[Cato]

Patents are *always* publicly disclosed, by definition - the inventor discloses the patent for public good and advancement of state of the art, with the caveat that they get a monopoly on use of patent for lifetime of the patent.

Trade secrets are entirely different which is what you may be thinking of. Try googling for 'patent' :)

When your company name becomes a verb...

[path_man]

When your company name becomes a verb (google): to search for something; I'm going to google for that computer part you know that you're onto something.

Google has survived the dot.com bubble burst because they offer a great service that people want. The natural thing for most companies (brick and mortar or otherwise) is to spin-off and leverage the successful business model into something that will grow their company.

Re:When your company name becomes a verb...

[csmiller]

Try telling that to Hoover, who managed bankrupt themselves after a disaterous Free Flight promo, and are now owned by Maytag.

Re:When your company name becomes a verb...

[pjp6259]

One of the reasons why I bought some TIVO stock last weekend.

Re:When your company name becomes a verb...

[Zagadka]

Maytag owned Hoover before the Free Flight promo.

Anti-Google

[totallygeek]

Interesting that no one has purchased Fuck Google yet. It has been for sale for a while.

Re:Anti-Google

[obli]

I bet google will exclude it from their search results if someone ever starts that site...

Re:Anti-Google

[pheph]

Nahhhh, I bet they'll just threaten them to transfer the domain

Re:Anti-Google

[jxs2151]

Perhaps this speaks volumes and means that unlike most companies, Google has yet to really piss anyone off.

You know you have arrived(?) when someone creates a f*ckcompanyname.com site.

Re:Anti-Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me like a search engine for pr0n...

Re:Anti-Google

[elBart0]

Actually,
Someone has purchased the domain. But, as it's a domain squatter in Belize, I'm sure google will do nothing, until a site shows up there.
Don't forget, lawyers cost money. Can't send the attack dogs out after everyone.

Re:Anti-Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Google pissed off a LOT of Irishmen this past Monday when they didn't have their "google art" honoring the holiday. They did in 2002, but for some unknown reason chose to skip St. Patrick's Day this year.
Anti-Irish now? Anti-Catholic? P.C. gone too far? I don't know, but I AM pissed off.

At least for a little while. :-)

uh oh

[Joe the Lesser]

Google believes that users' productivity begins to wane after 0.2 seconds.

I must have problems, since it takes me at least 5 times that amount to decide what to search for!

It's pretty self-explanatory

[shayborg]

Any simple search engine that has become basically a cultural icon has to be special. You don't search for anything any more, you google for it.

Google was a good search engine in the beginning. It gained popularity, which made it a better search engine, which let it gain more popularity, which made it an even better search engine, ad infinitum.

It's not an exaggeration to claim that, right now, Google has earned itself the enviable position of becoming the first (at least nearly) definitive search engine.

-- shayborg

Re:It's pretty self-explanatory

[adzoox]

It is infinitely and easily helpful (much more so than Yahoo or Infoseek, etc, etc) to my research for my eBay items that I sell. It also helps me find out scam artists. One of the best features about Google is typing in an email address and seeing if that person has a residence or business or what they are involved in. I do this with everyone on Yahoo auctions that I bid or buy from. Try it with your own email address and see what it comes up with.

Re:It's pretty self-explanatory

[Anonymous Coward]

becoming the first (at least nearly) definitive engine.

Um, no. Both Yahoo and Alta Vista where "definitive" in their time. They both got replaced.

Is this a first?

[bunyip]

Wow - we've had a story up about somebody's website for at least 10 minutes and we haven't slashdotted it yet. Am I the only one who's noticed?

Alan.

Re:Is this a first?

[Iridar]

Maybe it's hosted by Google. Didn't you read? 10,000 servers!

Article summary reminds me of something

[Raul654]

My dad has taught at a Catholic school for about 3 decades now. He's always jokingly said he should write a book on what he's seen over the years. He told me that the principal many years ago was this stoddgy old priest. One day he gave a sermon -- "Love is like a cancer - it grows and grows"

Re:Article summary reminds me of something

[Anonymous Coward]

...and child molesting ensues.

Googlewhack?

[Noryungi]

You mean... You mean... a Google just for pr0n???

Oh, you mean that googlewhack!

Erm... Hem... Uh, never mind. Carry on.

funny image search engines

[obli]

personally I like these random image seach engines, anything can come up ;) http://homepage.tinet.ie/~fuzzbucket/google/ http://www.diddly.com/random/

didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[slashrot]

Funny that the article didn't mention the fact that Google's lawyers recently asked Paul McFedries to remove the word 'google' from his excellent wordspy lexicon. A company that 'gets it' indeed.

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[will_die]

Same way as kleenex,xerox and hormel(spam) have done.
All done for the reasons that want to keep the word for business use and don't want thier competitors to be able to use thier brand name as something else.
In the case you mentioned they had/have Google down as a synonym for search, a verb which cannot be protected. If Google did not protect their name they would have no more rights to use the word then Yahoo, or alta vista would to use the word.
IIRC, they finally solved the problem by mentioning that Google was a protected word of the Google corporation.

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[dissy]

> Funny that the article didn't mention the fact that Google's lawyers recently
> asked [linguistlist.org] Paul McFedries to remove the word 'google' from his
> excellent wordspy [wordspy.com] lexicon. A company that 'gets it' indeed.

Erm, thats odd, because that never happened. Did you just make that up on the spot or did it take you a while to prepare?

Google asked them to change their definition of 'google' from "To search for something" to "To search for something using the google search engine"

But they never once _DEMANDED_ that they remove the word google.

The wordspy.com listing was clearly incorrect.
Google simply corrected them.

So no its not too funny that the article didnt mention lies and FUD. Its a refreshing change actually.

What I _do_ find funny is you even link right to the article that proves me right and your own statements wrong! Did you even read it?

Direct quote from the article you linked:
> we want to make sure that when people use "Google," they are referring
> to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching
> in general.

The email then ends with:
> We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of
> "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the
> trademark status of Google.

Hell, even keeping the clearly wrong and incorrect definition would be OK with google if they simply added a (TM) mark after the word Google from how their email reads!

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[shreak]

If they want to maintain the Google trademark they are required to take this kind of action. By not activly defending a trademark you risk losing it into the public domain (cf. Kleenex, et. al.).

Google does not want to see the following phrases to become common place:

"I just used MSN to GOOGLE for the latest IIS exploit"
"My Yahoo GOOGLE sure brings up a bunch of ads"

My understanding of the situation was that Google ASKED to have the term removed as opposed to using a Cease and Desist letter right off the bat.

=Shreak

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[EnVisiCrypt]

Same way as kleenex,xerox and hormel(spam) have done.

Actually, Hormel has, in fact, stated that they don't mind the use of Spam to describe unwanted e-mail.

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[p0ppe]

...as long as it isn't written with a capital S as you just did.

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[Gorgonzola]

That still makes perfect sense since common usage of the term spam to describe unsolicited bulk e-mail only would dilute Hormel's Spam trademark if their product involved any form of e-mail. Since their business is processed pork and thus has no connection with e-mail whatsoever it is quite easy for them not to object to the usage of the term 'spam' for unwanted e-mail.

Sometimes I wonder what's so bloody hard about trademark law that the slashdot geeks almost always get it wrong. Of all areas in law it has the most straightforward logic and one would suppose that it would be relatively easy for geeks to grok it.

Remember this: from a legal perspective trademarks are about the ease of laying a connection between the product and it's producer in the consumer's mind. As long as consumer's won't be confused or won't be likely to make such a connection anymore, there is nothing the owner of the trademark can do about it (apart from intimidation through threatening with lawsuits).

So Hormel's 'liberal' approach to spam and Google sending in the 'goons' are equally sensible approaches to completely different problems.

But I am afraid I have spent too much time on the soapbox already, the slashbots are as likely to get it as the average pointy haired boss is likely to really grasp an technological issue.

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[slashrot]

First, if you read my comment, I never used the word 'demanded'. I said 'asked' and I believe that to be accurate.

The wordspy editor was given the choice to either remove the word or allow Google to essentially define the word.

The definitions in wordspy are meant to reflect the way a word is commonly used; I certainly have seen usage of the word 'google' to mean searching in general.

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[johnnymonkey]

Do you Yahoo!? Google isn't alone in recognizing phrases using their trademark in association with use of their website.

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[dissy]

> Do you Yahoo!? Google isn't alone in recognizing phrases using their trademark
> in association with use of their website.

I never said they were.

However unlike the parent poster i replied to, I feel if someone started saying "To yahoo means search on any engine not just yahoo's" that Yahoo would get ticked and want them to use it correctly, just like google did.

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news today, Barney Google and his lawyer, Snuffy Smith, sued Google.com for copyright name infringement.

"My name has been Google since 1919, long before there ever was an internet thing."

Re:didn't mention google's legal goons, though

[sholden]

Damn kids these days.

To grep is to search in general.

To google is some new flash in the pan fad. Just like those "personal computer" things.

google smackdown.

[leuk_he]

Here is the google cache for google smackdown that is currently /.'ed

Just a Shill-Puff Piece?

[Montgomery Burns III]

With all due respect to the good people at Fast Company, I was alomost made ill as the writer gushed over how wonderful
EVERYTHING at Google was.
Being just a bit cynical, without being a a conspiracy theorist, I wonder why. Does google plan on a big advert prgram with Fast? Does the writer want a new job? hmmmm.

Re:Just a Shill-Puff Piece?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more of that crap superficial dot-com-boom-era kind of sloppy "journalism".

I think you're right on the money.

THE FIRST THING YOU SEE

[Syncroswitch]

I was just wondering how many people use Google as their home page. It seems to be the sight I use the most when I am trying to finish real work. ( I spend more time on Slashdot, but that dosent make it useful... its like taking the newspaper, or LJ to the bathroom...) Does anyone know of a listing or poll of homepage settings. Would slashdot like to run one...

Re:THE FIRST THING YOU SEE

[pipingguy]

I don't know about others, but my browser is set to display a home made custom start page that resides on my hard disk.

intersting results

[MrSkunk]

Very pointless, but yet somewhat entertaining. Someone set up a site where you can quickly perform a googleshare calculation on terms. Here are some of the results that I found kind of intersting.

'microsoft' has a 24.44% googleshare of 'anti-trust'

'linux' has a 62.64% googleshare of 'open source'

Re:intersting results

[peterjhill2002]

results from googleshare...
'google' has a 7.65% googleshare of 'slashdot'

There are 8 out of 10 top-ten result matches.

Which gives a bonus ranking of 38/55: (10 for top result, 9 for next etc...)

Seriously though, I remember trying to find people or facts on yahoo, altavista, lycos, and it would be a long process that often came up with nothing. Google, OTOH, is like the Hitchhikers Guide, it has larger suplanted other pedistrian search engines and has become the defacto standard of information search and retrievial.

What the hell is Google?

[teamhasnoi]

I hear all this talk about it, but there is no link in the story.

Is there a good search engine I could check to see what this 'Google' is?

niche search engines

[blinder]

I use google, but I find using niche search engines to be much more useful. Google is great for getting a bajillion returns, and the first 2 or 3 pages worth are mostly relevant, but for specifics I use some of the niche search engines. A good one is diysearch and sites like Outersound for finding indy music and other resources.

Yeah, it takes a bit more work to find these niche search engines/resources, but they are out there, and the noise is much much lower.

Just my $.02

Re:niche search engines

[clonebarkins]

Yeah, it takes a bit more work to find these niche search engines/resources, but they are out there, and the noise is much much lower.

So what do you google to find them?

Re:niche search engines

[blinder]

heh... sorta like a vicious circle isn't it?

i suppose the "it takes a bit more work" part means using something other than google :)

Re:niche search engines

[Rinikusu]

LOL
I was listening to that album this morning on the way to work.. :: sigh ::

no automatic link parsing...

[obli]

here's clickable links for you lazy people...

link

link

Google News

[Jaguar777]

I'm beginning to wonder what percentage of new Slashdot stories deal with google. Google seems to be a topic just as active as Microsoft. Maybe it is time for a Google section?

Re:Google News

[mars9820]

Nah.....they are too lazy to create a new logo for that at /.

Am i the only one who has a problem with google?

[SolemnDragon]

For example, the page ranking system will consistently return results based on who's linked with what, so a link to, oh, say... slashdot... would change your ranking completely when turning up in results, regardless of how actually relevant your page were????

granted, we had already this article and then there was playing with google, and don't forget why you should fear google .

Me, i'm all in favour of googlewatch. But, on the other hand, i might just be paranoid.... Tinfoil hat, anyone? But big companies online seem as much worth paying attention to as big corporations in the brick market, so i see this as one to pay attention to, and i really liked it when companies started ditching google. Yay for small webworks!!!

Put enough smart people together and ...

[kinnell]

So Google got rid of the managers

I hope this is an idea which catches on. Think what mankind could achieve if engineers were free to be creative, unhindered by the mindnumbing shackles of management and beaurocracy.

Re:Put enough smart people together and ...

[Idarubicin]

Think what mankind could achieve if engineers were free to be creative, unhindered by the mindnumbing shackles of management and beaurocracy[sic].

Isn't that where atom bombs come from?

I recommend reading Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! --in particular the chapter Los Alamos From Below.

Re:Put enough smart people together and ...

[thenerd]

I can imagine that world...

83594834 winamp visualisations...
4570569 more empty projects on sourceforge than there are currently...
4504595 *really* nasty perl scripts that no-one will ever change for fear of breaking...

(shiver)

Re:Put enough smart people together and ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing engineers with Slashbots, which is quite a confusion of ideas.

could be better

[Zurk]

gah. this is supposed to be perfection ? i can think of a million ways google news could be better.
1. too bloody cluttered.
whats with all the blue links and one line of black text in plain text mode with gigantic amounts of whitespace at the right hand side?
godammit. i want a series of boxes with a SINGLE link for each story. Use ALL the space on the page. maybe a small . at the side of each story which allows me to pull up a list of URLS but thats it.
2. the picture based news page looks like netscape.com
whats with the crappy layout ? make it better. netscape.com is annoying as hell, and is probably the worst from a usability standpoint.
3. feedback sucks
they used to have feed back forms on their page, now they have email only links. whats up with that ? i *liked* the forms. no need to pull up a web client, login to email and send it off.
4. country specific bullshit.
i dont want google.co.uk just because i route my connection thru JANET. i dont want google.de or google.ca just cause the fucked up system thinks im in germany or canada cos thats where my internet2 connection is routed thru at that moment....i want google.com dammit. i dont want country specific censoring. fuck that.

Re:could be better

[Anonymous Coward]

i want google.com dammit.

http://www.google.com/en

Re:could be better

[eyeye]

dont fucking visit it then or make a better one, what is your problem.
Do you really want to make people click on a dot, you dont have any idea about what makes a good website?
The country specific bullshit (you skiving student!) is easily overriden by changing your preferences.

Please dont mod me down for my foul language, it was appropriate ;-)

Re:could be better

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an asshole.

Re:could be better

[crimson30]

"The country specific bullshit (you skiving student!) is easily overriden by changing your preferences."

EH! Wrong answer! You do not win the color TV!
Google checks your IP, not your country preferences... plug my rj45 into your comp and www.google.com will bring up http://www.google.com.tr/
Of course, the parent could just use http://www.google.com/en (or http://www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/)...

Try Googling it.

[Hell O'World]

Have you tried putting "search engine" in a search engine?

Re:Try Googling it.

[Bombcar]

Try

"best search engine"

and

"worst search engine"

Quite Funny!

Re:Try Googling it.

[rat7307]

hilarious!!!

that's the best thing i've seen since the about:mozilla thingy in IE5!!

Google grows from the roots

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think", detailing the first account of a hypothetical hyperlinking system. In it, he writes of a system that keeps track of where a user surfs (not the terminology he uses), and the user is able to make comments about connections about different pieces of media. The more a user traverses the same path of connections between two documents, the heavier the link becomes, so to speak. I just reread this article a couple of weeks ago and was shocked at the parallels with Google; particularly how they use established links to figure out the ranking of a page, and then thinking about how they bought Blogger (presumably, so people could make comments about connections on the web). Perhaps Google's success comes because they have created a system that so successfully mimics the way that we think collectively.

Re:Google grows from the roots

[clonebarkins]

So, if Google is basically following a system that has already been described, well in advance of Google's own implementation, wouldn't it's patents be null and void as prior art?

But 'googly' means...

[jkrise]

In cricket, a googly is a ball that is bowled in a deceptive way - surprisingly that would be the correct adjective for Microsoft!

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=googly

Time for a name change perhaps?

Google proves that...

[MongooseCN]

Google proves that not being bought out (advertisements, false rankings..) pays off more in the long run.

When?

[dance2die]

When are we ever going to bother looking for alternatives for Google? Is it when Google take over the Net like M$ did over PC? I think Google already pulled the same thing M$ did. But what is the point of looking for the other searching engines? Is it just for fun? I was happy when Only yahoo and Altavista were the primary searching engines. Now, people are like Google this, Google that, Google that word up on Google. The word Google has been evern verbalized. We gotta stop promoting one searching engine just because it is the one of the best (some might think it's just the best) searching engines out there. But Google has patented their searching algorithm which is not so cool with me...

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

But Google has patented their searching algorithm which is not so cool with me.

Yes, that's right, because everything should be open source. The community should provide all the content for everything. Keep information free! While we're at it, why don't we just switch over to a fully communist society and we can all have computers and free food. Wouldn't that be great?

Look, kid, I don't know what world you live in, but out here in the real world, people have to make money. If they spend a hell of a lot of time and money creating an extremely efficient search algorithm, not to mention continious innovations and some heavy duty servers, but only make pennies back on the ads they have sprinkled inobtrusively, then you know what, they probably deserve to hoard their industrial secrets so that they don't lose their shirt when someone copies their code and goes head-to-head with them with their own product.

Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[Hell O'World]

From the article: ...without alienating neophytes who type in "amazon.com" to find . . . Amazon.com. ( Yes, people really do that. Google doesn't know why. )

I have watched users do this, and it is pretty obvious why. To the neophyte, there are just these boxes where you type in stuff. It is not clear that one is part of the browser and one is being generated by a web page. Advertisers take advantage of this same misunderstanding when they have ads that look like dialog boxes. Which reminds me, I don't know how to tell you this, but, your computer is not optimized for downloading!

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[TonyZahn]

Another Theory on this...

I'm no neophyte, but I'll often google for a company name if I'm not 100% sure of the URL, mostly at work where I share an office and want to avoid URL typo-camping pr0n sites. Nothing more annoying than accidently getting sent to a pr0n site when you're actually trying to get to a legitimate work-related site. And we won't even talk about the stuff that keeps popping up when you try to close the window...

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[Corporal Dan]

It actually makes perfect sense. When I start my browser, Google pops up as the homepage and the cursor automatically is in the Google search text box. Rather than click in my browser's url box and then type the url in, half the time I just type the url into the Google search box and hit enter.

Sure it requires an extra click from the Google search results page to get to the site I visited, but I don't lose any time because I didn't have to click to the browser url box. So it all comes out equal in the end.

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[clonebarkins]

Wouldn't it be even easier to just save it as a favorite? Then it's just a click on a toolbar....

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[grotgrot]

I do it all the time and not for the reasons you mention. The most important one is that Google does any spelling correction. It also puts the prefixes. (eg you type amazon.com and it comes up with www.amazon.com). It also gives you a list of things you can do with the address (backwards links, sites that contain the term etc). Although there are other ways of doing these, just typing in a portion of the url is quick and easy.

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[Schnapple]

Actually I do something slightly different. Let's say I'm looking for the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on Amazon.com. I either have to go to Amazon.com, let it redirect me to that whatever-the-hell-it-is URL, go to the search box, type in the name, select "Books" from the pull-down menu, look at the search results, click the name of the book I want, then click through another page of Amazon trying to sell me unrelated crap that they think I want before I get to the book. I can shorten this by going to amazon.com/books and if there's only one edition and one book named what I'm looking for then I can save another click or two, but either way I have to go through some digging to get to one book listing on Amazon, not to mention the "free shipping" popup. Not that this is some horrible hassle or anything (much easier than looking for the book at the local B&N) but it's still some digging.

Or, I can Google for "Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom" Amazon into my Google Toolbar and boom - the page is the first result. And if I use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, I go there instantly. It's quick and it works.

Also, in the Google Toolbar if you search for "http://www.amazon.com/", then it takes you to amazon.com, but do that on the main Google page and it gives you the skinny on that URL instead of just taking you there. This is obviously meant to help along less savvy users, but it could be that those users now use the Google Toolbar instead of the Address bar in IE (I think my Mom does this).

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[Jester99]

A couple helpful mouse-free navigation tips:

If you're using Internet Explorer, you can roll your fingers onto ALT+D very quickly, and it'll send your cursor up to the address bar, with the current contents already highlighted.

Furthermore, pressing ctrl+enter will intelligently add "www." and ".com" to your current entry; so ALT+D,"amazon",CTRL+ENTER will bring you to the address bar and then take you to www.amazon.com. After a few days of practicing doing that, it becomes very fast indeed.

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[poot_rootbeer]

I don't know how to tell you this, but, your computer is not optimized for downloading!

Yeah, I know. It's because too much of my bandwidth is being used up by my PC broadcasting an IP Address to the world.

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[Corporal Dan]

Ooh, alt-d works under Mozilla as well. Excellent. My googling-for-amazon days are over. Thanks, Jester....

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[rthille]

I recently set up a domain and 1 page website for our friends who clean carpets. They wondered why it didn't come up when they typed the address. The were typing the address into a yahoo search box on the day the site went live. The didn't have a clue of the difference between the address and the search boxes in the browser.
Explaining it wasn't that hard though: "Here, this is where you type someone's phone number. Here is where you type their name to lookup their phone number."... Light goes on... :-)

Re:Searching on Amazon.com to find Amazon.com

[jacoplane]

Also, if you install tweakui you can get cool search prefixes for the adress bar. For example (configure this in the tweakui window):

g http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s
imdb http://us.imdb.com/Find?%s
image http://images.google.com/images?q=%s
dict http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=%s

then in the adress bar you can type "imdb monty python" and it will search. Pretty nice.

One Thumb Up, One Thumb Down

[Snork Asaurus]

I just gave them a quick spin. Here's my highly subjective eval based on 2 minutes of use:

Vivisimo Light google-ish interface. "Clustered Results" is neat idea and may be quite useful. Seems a little light in the hits department, but so is every new search engine. Time will tell.

Kartoo Ugly. Requires Flash - bad move - game over.

Re:One Thumb Up, One Thumb Down

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because there sure isn't a HTML-only version of Kartoo

moron searching for survivors..

[Anonymous Coward]

in the gnu millennium

excellent google resource is trustworthycomputing.com

a must have for Godless greed/fear based payper liesense hostage ransom scam, stock markup fraud apologists, & softwar gangsters et AL.

a subsidiary of gov.va.msn?net? (VAST)? in the offering?

No

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I be a slashdot editor now?

Not a single misspelling in your post. Sorry.

fast 'company' indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

eventually, all searches will lead towards gov.va.msn.?net? (VAST)?, wonce trustworthycomputing.com is completedead? is that what you're saying? what an ediot. father william et AL, just waNTs US all to have a gooed time, while becoming stock markup billyunheirs, what's wrong with that? what an foem you are.

Same ride as Yahoo!

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

They never sell advertising to the same client twice, because once they've tried it they realise how poor value for money advertising on Google or Yahoo is so they don't come back.

The reason this doesn't bother Yahoo! or Google is because there is a huge market out there simply waiting to find out that it doesn't work.

intesting use of google

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to Google's home page, and search for "French military victories". Then, hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky button.

I think you will not be surprised at the results.

Re:intesting use of google

[Anonymous Coward]

An easter egg? Or an real/natural Google suggestion?

Re:intesting use of google

[openSoar]

lol - just brilliant..

Re:intesting use of google

[Anonymous Coward]

Google decided to make a snide political point, thereby subverting their previously excellent search engine. Shows what happens when you get fucking morons (aka engineers) running a company instead of professional managers.

Re:intesting use of google

[Anonymous Coward]

bwahaha. i'm slow, it fooled me.

Re:intesting use of google

[Anonymous Coward]

unfortunately, I can't take credit for finding this - a friend of mine forwarded me an email containing this.

Re:intesting use of google

[tordia]

Actually, if you look at the location bar, it's not google at all. It's a page on albino black sheep. That's crafted to looked like a google result page.

Re:intesting use of google

[WasterDave]

Exactly. Beautiful, isn't it.

Dave

Re:intesting use of google

[Handpaper]

if you look at the location bar, it's not google at all
No shit, Sherlock?
What tickles me is the results of a straight search on the same phrase - the top nine point to or are about [albinoblacksheep.com]. Maybe this is geek-related (geeks create links) but it's almost as funny as the faux-Google page.

Google coded with Perl?

[MakaveliFIN]

Is google's search engine coded with Perl? What about database, is it oracle? If someone happens to know.

Suggestions for Google

[NigelJohnstone]

Yeh, Googles great an' all, but that doesn't mean it can't be better.

All the main keywords come up with heavily text focussed sites because text is what Google can index properly. They need to be better at rating image sites and annimation sites.

Then there's the 'multi-domain' spamming - sites set up across multiple domains pretending to be different but all being basically the same, simply for the link bonus.

If Google detects that several domains are really the same site, then it should treat all links between the sites as internal links in a single site, and all the sites corresponding pages should get the same PR value, since they *are* the same page, just on different domains.

At the moment it seems to assign the PR to one of the sites and drop the PR on the others. I can understand that they don't want a big cluster of sites dominating the index, but shouldn't it simply treat the sites as one great big site and return only 2 entries from the whole group?

Also how about using geography & time to detect when weighting the value of a link?

Suppose 2 DNS entries are registered at roughly the same time by the same person in the same address those sites are more likely to be the same site so links between them should have a lower rating.

Now suppose 2 sites are registered by different people, but in the same town. Links between those two sites should be downgraded slightly, since there is a slight probability of collusion.

Same with domains that cross link at and were created at the same time but in different locations by different people. Much more likely that those people would be looking to link exchange and so the links would be less about content and more about exchange.

So the maximum weight would be given to a link that came later on as a site became more popular, from a site that was registered at a different time from a different person in a different location. In this case the chance of collusion would be very low so the link could be trusted more - its much more likely to be done for content reasons.

Re:Suggestions for Google

[Restil]

All the main keywords come up with heavily text focussed sites because text is what Google can index properly. They need to be better at rating image sites and annimation sites.

http://images.google.com specifically for this. Granted, its not perfect, but it's not bad either.

Then there's the 'multi-domain' spamming - sites set up across multiple domains pretending to be different but all being basically the same, simply for the link bonus.

If Google detects that several domains are really the same site, then it should treat all links between the sites as internal links in a single site, and all the sites corresponding pages should get the same PR value, since they *are* the same page, just on different domains.

Known affectionately as link farms. Google is well aware of them and they spend a great deal of effort in defeating them, to the point that they get sued for their success. Do a search on some slashdot articles relating to Searchking for more information.

-Restil

Appeasing WHO?!?

[sniser2]

'bush' has a 13.53% googleshare of 'hitler'

'saddam' has a 7.7% googleshare of 'hitler'

Re:Appeasing WHO?!?

[Lars T.]

That's not quite fair, most aren't comparing Shrubya to Hitler, they talk about his Granddad's involvement in financing Hitler (and getting filthy rich in the process).

Toot Toot!

[Whatsthiswhatsthis]

from Googlism:

cmdrtaco is getting married to the fine woman this website is run by
cmdrtaco is still known to post hoaxes or wild
cmdrtaco is gay
cmdrtaco is brilliant
cmdrtaco is nothing more than a perl script
cmdrtaco is lame
cmdrtaco is my hero
cmdrtaco is the one that is laying on the purple couch with the notebook
cmdrtaco is a torvelian
cmdrtaco is an idiot

And my favorite...

cmdrtaco is psychic

Re:Toot Toot!

[Anonymous Coward]

CmdrTaco is responsible for building the ultimate Nerd news site /
CmdrTaco is a dedicated programmer
CmdrTaco is a higher up on the internet celebrity totem-pole/boobie-prize
CmdrTaco is too busy to read this
site, slashdot [slashdot.org], which you speak of
CmdrTaco is a weenie

Googlism

[LHN]

Do a search for slashdot on googlism :)

[quote]slashdot is to linux what osama bin laden is to islam[/quote]

Yikes!

[shfted!]

I just typed my name into Googlism, and it said:

Mark Rose is nothing less than a dam fool

Strange

[arvindn]

And it's why, most of the time, the Google home page contains exactly 37 words. "We count bytes," says Google Fellow Urs Holzle, who is on leave from the University of California at Santa Barbara. "We count them because our users have modems, so it costs them to download our pages."

And yet the google logo on the home page is 8.3 KB!

Re:Strange

[Rhubarb Crumble]

And yet the google logo on the home page is 8.3 KB!

That's what "don't load images" (or lynx/links/emacs /whatever) are there for.

WHY DID GOOGLE BLACKLIST MY SITE????

[cryofan2]

I didn't spam anyone; my site (2 simple and separate URLs covering the same area) is not porn or warez, or even a commercial site. It is a political site. You can see one of my pages at http://www.geocities.com/cryofan/.

After just one week I managed to get my site ranked on the first page of google using the search string "navy nuclear power program" by posting 2 times to relevent newsgroup, and posting 2 messages on message boards of relevant websites, and by linking the 2 pages together.
I used no meta tags or search engines optimization techniques or other tricks. These are/were simple handmade HTML pages.

However, not too long after that first week, when my main page came up on google first page of search returns, both my websites DISAPPEARED from google completely. Why?

Maybe because my websites speak out against the crappy workplace provided by the US Navy on nuclear submarines. Looks like google likes kissing the ass of the US Govt. That is what it looks like to me!

Google should search E2...

[Destoo]

Google should parse E2...
Then again, Google should probably search (insert your favorite site here).

let's check the robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Question is why... to prevent deep linking?

Google not a monopoly, part of an oligopoly

[bmcent1]

I LOVE Google! I thought it was the best search engine out there from the day I first saw it in beta. It is fast, clean, and the results returned are usually right on the mark. They used comodity computing hardware and Linux (I think, or BSD) to get the most computing power for their dollar. What worries me, because I have recently come face to face with the status quo, is that Goodle, and FAST/AllTheWeb/Inktomi (possibly including LookSmart) virtually OWN the entire web seach business. There are two or three corporations now that run the backend seach engines for the top 20 web search sites. That alone would not necessarily be a problem. But have you tried to get your site listed in a seach engine lately? Google and AllTheWeb now tell you to expect 4-8 weeks to be listed. On most you can pay money for an "expedited listing." Back in my day, the search engines WANTED URL submissions and they would crawl your site quickly because there was a lot of competition to build the biggest indexes on the web. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Google, and other search engines are incredibly important to the web. When search engines started out, they didn't accept pay for placement or expedited listing for a fee. Serving such a central role on the web, this trend is not the direction I'd like to see search engines taking.

Re:Google not a monopoly, part of an oligopoly

[saifatlast]

Hey look, I can be a jerk!!!

I believe it's oligarchy. ;)

Re:Google not a monopoly, part of an oligopoly

[OneFix]

Well, this may be the situation right now, but if it continues for long, someone is bound to start indexing faster and will therefore gain market share from Google/Fast...

I currently prefer Google, but both are fairly good...

Google will likely stay up there for a long time, but sooner or later it will be #2...

The barriers to entry for the search engine market are still not as high as in the auto industry (for instance)...

Maybe the next one will be Teoma (Owned by Ask Jeeves, Inc.)...

But until then, I'll still keep an eye on Search Engine Watch...

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

informative

I Agree with your Point 4

[Anonymous Coward]

I am from Canada and I never want to be presented with Canadian spin. Here, the fucking Liberals control the propaganda. The very reason I go on the Internet is to get away from it. Naturally, when I sign up for things like Hotmail, I tell them a country other than Canada to avoid the Liberal bullshit it assumes I want. So I avoid google.ca like the plague and am enraged when it is offered me.

Love Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate microsoft, adore linux.
What a load of hypocritical horseshit.

I declare a boycott google strike in action now!

purely because it's sad enough now that
someone wrote a book about it! would you believe!

Get a life you bunch of sad fucks and stop copying everyone elses!

Re:Am i the only one who has a problem with google

[NDPTAL85]

A page's relevance is deteremined by how many pages are linked to it as well.

Now think of this recursively and you get how Google works.

OK, One Thumb Horizontal for Kartoo

[Snork Asaurus]

I guess that if they had placed the html link more prominently or had both an "OK Flash" and an "OK HTML" button, I would have noticed. Or maybe the default should be HTML since everybody has/uses HTML as opposed to flash. It does set a cookie for the default after you've used it once.

Conceptually, I like the keyword add/ignore suggestions and auto re-categorizing - this could be very empowering if it works well. I can't see a clear indication of the number of hits it finds and it's still ugly (get rid of the damned dark blue background) and it needs some UI improvements. And why does it default to the "UK Web" (and not change this in with a cookie, like the interface)?

what's with googlesyndication?

[miguel_at_menino.com]

I've been seeing ads everywhere (including slashdot), that use "pageads.googesyndication.com" as their URL. They're frames (or iframes or something), with a bunch of textads.

Like this:

http://tinyurl.com/7plg

Weird stuff. Anybody have the scoop on that?

Re:what's with googlesyndication?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently Google is now selling the ability to have their text ads pop up on other web sites. Now you can buy advertising through them on other places.

Now their purchase of that blogging stuff makes a bit more sense, huh?

Re:what's with googlesyndication?

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha - I knew this hypocritical bullshit was here for a reason ... promote google, get paid = true.
read between the lines.

Why Google is successful, really

[Animats]

Fast Company doesn't get it. Google is successful because they live within their means. They started as a low-cost operation, and they didn't pour money into "expansion" until they had actual revenue to cover it. Compare, say, VA Linux, with that huge IPO for a dinky company.

Stock market hype types keep talking about Google "going public". They're more likely to go private; the founders may buy out the venture capitalists.

Re:Why Google is successful, really

[Anonymous Coward]

these are astute observations, too bad i don't have mod points. i rarely post but when i do its usually to tout the obvious sense of engineer-founded companies versus those founded by businessmen and bean-counters.

you are right about them going private. the typical rules don't apply to this company. if they're like most engineers they're making more money (even as a private company) than they probably ever expected to in their lives and they will want to go after control. if there are venture capitalists involved it wouldn't suprise me if they were bought out by the founders.

Re:Why Google is successful, really

[ktorn]

Well, that's certainly one of the reasons, but far from being the reason.

If I had to pick the reason, the perhaps I'd go for: Google is successful because its founders had the vision and knowledge to put it all together.
But then, this probably applies to anything and everything, so it's kind of useless.

The fact is that, within the words vision and knowledge lies all the reasons why Google is successful, and the financing of the venture is just one of them. I think Fast Company's article does list a series of good reasons.

Re:Why Google is successful, really

[mars9820]

Stock market hype types keep talking about Google "going public". They're more likely to go private; the founders may buy out the venture capitalists. This will just never happen....Why at the first place you think they have venture capitalists to join in? Right...because they didn't have the money laying around to expand by themself. And with Google getting bigger and bigger by the day the amount of money the VC's are expecting in return are a factor of that growth. An IPO is the only way to give them this money....

Re:Why Google is successful, really

[TheProphetMargin]

What?!?! Live within our means? You've got to be kidding...I read a lot of newspapers and business magazines and they keep telling me the main business tactic of ALL internet businesses is to spend huge amounts of capital on un-needed technology and then bail before the bottom falls out. Google has ignored all these "rules".
Google has done a number of business thingies well..
1) only spend what it has
2) do what you do best
3) don't pander to the lowest common denominator
4) keep improving on perfection


There are a lot of businesses that could learn a lot by sticking to these 4 rules. We have and we're still alive and growing.


The Prophet Margin
http://www.my-vegas.com
"The Glitter Guide to Sin City"

Googlism on George Bush ...

[stefffm]

... starts with:

"george bush is a monkey"

How is google funded?

[INeedWeed]

Does anyone know how google pays its bills?

I've heard they're using more than 10.000 PCs, which should impose pretty high maintenance and housing costs to them, apart from the traffic they have to pay for...

Can they really fund this from the advertisement on the hit pages?

It simply works

[MoobY]

That's great about google - it works, and they seem to be able to survive because of revenues from google-related products.

Many non-computer-scientist family members of me actually think that google is the internet. I say that's good for them if it works fro them.

And it does.

Here's why to search for Foo.com

[Ungrounded Lightning]

From the article: ...without alienating neophytes who type in "amazon.com" to find . . . Amazon.com. (Yes, people really do that. Google doesn't know why. )

I can tell you why. Because I have done it. (Well, maybe not to find amazon.com. But typing a URL in the Google search box.)

I wanted to find the google cache of an article that was slashdotted.

I had hoped that Google's interface would be clueful enough to include pages whose URL was an exact match for the search string - bringing up the index page with a link to the cache.

No dice.

The google front-page interface doesn't give an obvious way to get from a URL to the cache entry without knowing the content of the page you're trying to find. And cache links themselves include magic numbers, which implies that you can't just come up with a default conversion of a URL into a google cache link.

Re:Here's why to search for Foo.com

[ChaosDiscord]

And cache links themselves include magic numbers, which implies that you can't just come up with a default conversion of a URL into a google cache link.

They don't advertise it, but the "cache:" prefix works just like you think it does. Strip off the "http://" from the front of desired url, replace it with "cache:" and you'll get the cache. For example, a minimal URL to link to a cache of Slashdot's about page at http://slashdot.org/about.shtml is http://google.com/search?q=cache:slashdot.org/abou t.shtml . (The space in the URL is courtesy of Slashdot's borken anti-page widening defenses.)

Re:Here's why to search for Foo.com

[bleeeeck]

It may have recently changed, but typing a url to get a link to the cache page works for me.

The magic number in the cache links look like they're optional also.

Google, the people's search engine

[ktorn]

Back in 1997, while spending some time at Digital Equipment Corp. (aka Compaq, aka HP) as part of my 1-year industrial placement, instead of getting any work done I kept planning my degree's final year project: a client-side search tool, using intelligent agents (I loved that expression back then) to crawl the web and rank pages according to how they link to one another (what I called web-communities). I had this grand idea of using this client as the beginning of a massive peer-to-peer search engine, that would collect the results of the distributed indexing and provide a unique front end for it. I even went as far as buying a domain name for it.

Why didn't I do it? Because Google arrived.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one disappointed with the search tools of the time, trying to come up with a better one. But Google was it. It was the next big thing, so I happily shelved the megamap project.

In my opinion they have the right approach to everything they do (well, a few minor exceptions perhaps), including the right way to rank pages, the right way to present results, the right approach to advertising, the right way to conduct a .com business, the right approach to you name it.
And above all, the right approach to the users, the people.

Have you ever thought about why there isn't any willingness within the open-source community to produce a large-scale open source search engine?
Could it be because there is no need for one? Google, in listening to it's users, and sometimes even providing more than what we asked for, ensures loyalty and keeps garage duos happy*. For example, after acquiring Deja, the Google folks went through the trouble of ensuring all the old hyperlinks to deja Usenet articles got properly forwarded to the new google URLs. As one person in Usenet said, and I try to quote as closely as I can: "they weren't forced to do it. it's pure public service".

Google is the people's web search engine. As long as they keep the people happy (and yes, that involves to keep innovating), they will keep growing stronger and bigger. (whether growing bigger is a good thing is open to debate)

* for those who didn't follow: garage duos are those who, when unhappy with something, produce the next killer application ;)

Re:Am i the only one who has a problem with google

[arkanes]

Okay, since you're apparently just read Googlwatch (who can't even look up democracy in a dictionary, apparently), rather than thinking about it, here's a quick rundown on how and why Google ranks pages like this:

Say you've got this vast sea of text files, all of which have content about something. You want to provide a way to search these files. So, you index all the words on the page (paying special attention to meta tags, and maybe words in title tags). This is what the early search engines did, and it worked great until people relized they can draw more traffic by just adding every keyword they could think of to the meta tags. So you need a better way, instead of relying on a page to be honest about it's contents.

So Google came up with a pretty clever solution. It weights the keywords that other sites link to you with, as well as the contents of those sites. So if you sell custom car parts, and you're linked from a site that sells import car parts, then you're going to be ranked higher on searches for car parts. On top of that, sites that are linked by lots of other sites are high traffic sites. This means they tend to be the most popular, and therefore (probably) the most relevent. So you then take this concept and apply it recursively to the entire set of documents you're indexing, and you get a pretty good rating of sites that're relevent.

One of the reasons why this technique pisses off the people behind Googlewatch is that it means you can't get a high ranking unless other people think your page is usefull and relevant. It's true that this means it's hard to get enough critical mass for a high page rank. On the other hand, if you're the only one who things your site is relevent, it probably isn't.

Re:Am i the only one who has a problem with google

[Anonymous Coward]

google-watch is interesting, but um...

"Alltheweb (now owned by Overture) does the best overall crawling, followed by Google..."
i'm interested to see how they came to this conclusion because, according to each site's homepage, google seems to crawl about a million more sites than alltheweb. maybe google managed to increase capacity by a million webpages in the last two and a half weeks. maybe google-watch uses a different definition of "best" and "overall".

"...up to one-third of each screen is dedicated to paid ads on Google..."
this sounds odd indeed. i run at 1024x768, but i suppose it's possible that some people can't afford to run at more than 320x240.

"...we consider the ad stripping to be one of our proxy's best features."
considering how unobstrusive google ads are, i find this comment very amusing.

but yeah, google-watch has some interesting points.

some comments

[theblacksun]

for starters... This article is really grinding Google's special place, making them sound like a dream company, operating flawlessly. And it could be true.

But at the same time, we don't know what Google is missing. There could be large tracts of web servers unknown to the engine, and they quite possibly will eventually die because they don't get google coverage. That is the big problem with one great big search engine.

I'd rather see about two or three google-like companies all competing to give people the best damned web search in the world. But until anyone else masters pigeons like google has, we won't get it.

Re:some comments

[Anonymous Coward]

But at the same time, we don't know what Google is missing. There could be large tracts of web servers unknown to the engine, and they quite possibly will eventually die because they don't get google coverage. That is the big problem with one great big search engine.

That is what the speciality search engines are for. There is a short list searchenginewatch.com which contains at least two engines who attempt to cover non-textual information.

Re:Am i the only one who has a problem with google

[johnnymonkey]

Yes. As a matter of fact you are the only one.

Hey, Moderator, do you know how to argue?

[cryofan2]

...if you disagree with me, try responding to my post. Moderating me as a troll is bullshit. I had a point to make, and I made it with evidence. Where is your argument or evidence?

So, you are just a little chickenshit, huh?

Re:Hey, Moderator, do you know how to argue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your web page sucks.

Google is infallible.

Therefore, Google was merely acknowledging the fact that your web page sucks.

On Topic ads?

[Xeth]

It's no longer true, but when I used to search for "genetic algorithms" the first link I would get would be:

GENETIC ALGORITHMS
Buy, sell, and trade on eBay!

Google and Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

The article describes five rules that make google tick:
-The User Is in Charge
-The World Is Your R&D Lab
-Failures Are Good. Good Failures Are Better
-Great People Can Manage Themselves
-If Users Come, So Will the Money

Lets see what these rules look like if applied to Microsoft,
-Microsoft is in charge
-Setup an R&D lab as big as the world
-It takes three failures (versions) to get a product right
-Great people are easier to manage
-Think of great ways to make money and then get the users

Opera also Googles

[midgley]

The Opera browser, which I like, also includes two Google features:- a search box in every browser window (Its an MDI if anyone isn't used to it already) next to teh URL slot; and if you give a "URL" as g mysearchstring it involkes g.

Please give parent +informative

[Ungrounded Lightning]

They don't advertise it, but the "cache:" prefix works just like you think it does.

Thanks! (Tried it, works great!)

Will sombody please mod ChaosDiscord's post +informative? Thanks.

I need to use the different engine when...

[ledestin]

...I'm looking for local (as of country) things, because this engine understands Russian word conjugations.

While in English we just have "japanese" I have counted 4 conjugation forms for this adjective in Russian. These forms differ by suffixes, so, google isn't the easiest choice for such searches.

Tell that to Xerox

[jtheory]

Google has clearly arrived *somewhere*... but they need to keep in mind that their place at the top of the mountain is NOT assured.

Xerox isn't dead and gone, but they've had a lot of problems over the past 2 years, especially, in large part because of overconfidence and success hiding the growing corporate bloat... and it's funny how you can hear people say "lemme just xerox this and I'll get it back to you" as they step towards their HP copier.

Don't give them ideas....

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh oh, I think /.'s p0rn spammers are rushing to pick it up and use it now.

hmm

[adamruck]

I wonder how many people at google are reading this right now and taking notes on things they can improve on... I would be willing to bet more then a few

Shit Fer Brains Moderators

[cryofan5]

The Blacklisted poster above posts on a thread about Google, saying he thinks it sucks, and he gets modded for a troll. WTF?!

Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

It grows... and grows.... and grows...

It looks like my... my... >:^P ... debt. :-/

Re:What if Iraq HAS A-Bombs?

[Anonymous Coward]

We have more than they have. Iraq could easily be turned into a smoking hole in the ground.

And we'd still have enough nukes to get France, Germany, North Korea, and your hometown.

Ha

ha

Re:I can't believe it!!

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU AGAIN?? You've posted this same inane drivel on every subject.

Listen up, bozo. We're going to go through the Iraqi army like shit through a goose. Now go to bed and get some sleep. Stop worrying so much.

Oh, and cut back on the coffee.

Here it goes...

[spoons67]

another good googleshare...
"goatse" has a .45% googleshare of "Slashdot"!
So 1 in 200 posts mentions goatse, indicating that hardly a major story passes without some mention of that...thing.

ironic?

[crimson30]

Well, Vannevar Bush was considered a pioneer with much of his historical presence lending from his differential analyzer... even though it was a Babbage retread (apparantly he was unaware of Babbage's work). So I guess that makes things even, eh?

google fight: google vs yahoo, Yahoo WINS!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=g oogle&q2=yahoo&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue =us

No, not work

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the "because it works" subject line should have been changed at about this point in the discussion.

Useless on the net prehaps

[Anonymous Coward]

But in a company it would be very useful if you indexed all your documents/databases and googleshared on a particular subject to determine what employees would best cover that area.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[dpt]

Why do you keep posting this lame shit as a comment to an unrelated story after some important news event occurs?

This garbage has been torn to shreds repeatedly, yet you continue to post it. I've seen it at least three times. Only a few words change each time.

Are you stupid, or what? Were you dropped on your head at birth? What do you expect to achieve with this? What agenda are you pushing, exactly? You must have one, to keep this up for more than a year. It's impossible to tell from your incoherent ramblings what you want, so it's time to bring your message of meaningful purpose to us all.

Please tell us what to do to make you happy. Anything to help a poor loser such as yourself. Then you can hopefully move on, and get some sort of life for yourself.

Google Continues its Trademark Vigilance

[markkellman]

In the latest chapter of Google protecting their trademark, they even asked the dictionary folks at Wordspy to change their definition of the word "google" to prevent it from becoming a generic word. All this has caused mixed reactions and lots of news coverage by microdocs (formerly Google Village), Search Engine Watch, and Internet.com. Their latest target seems to be the Google Web APIs-based automated search service Googlert, who changed their name to "Google Alert" and explain that they were asked "politely" and have been "sympathetic" to Google's concerns. It's nice to see that they let them keep the word 'Google' in the name - I guess Google is trying to keep web developers on its side.

Last Post!

[alpg]

XLI:
The more one produces, the less one gets.
XLII:
Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.
XLIII:
Hardware works best when it matters the least.
XLIV:
Aircraft flight in the 21st century will always be in a westerly
direction, preferably supersonic, crossing time zones to provide the
additional hours needed to fix the broken electronics.
XLV:
One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the
unexpected should have been expected.
XLVI:
A billion saved is a billion earned.
-- Norman Augustine

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...